First opened Tuesday, October 24, 2006
平ら
たいら
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
flatness, level, smooth
Taira is た (ta-) plus 平 (hira), attested in the Nihon Shoki (720 CE).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 平
In a sentence
昔、地球は平らなものだと考えられていた。
It used to be thought that the earth was flat.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “た (ta-) + 平 (hira).”
- “Attested in the Nihon Shoki (720 CE). The Ruiju Myōgishō (late Heian period) gives two readings for 平, タヒラ (tahira, modern taira) and タヒラカ (tahiraka); it is not clear whether the two had different meanings.”
Source: Wiktionary: 平ら (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.